Aargh! I thought I had it figured out perfectly. I got an 18GB Empeg model, knowing that I have a lot of music. 230 so CD's and a bunch of assorted MP3's (all of which I also own the original, of course.) I did some tests and figured out that 128k CBR encoding (with LAME) was the same perceivable quality as higher bitrate VBR's, at least on my factory system. So I thought I'd fit all my music on. So I come into work on a Sunday to scan in my CD's (I work in a lab with 10 PC's with fast CD-ROM drives.) And I come up about 10 albums short of space on my Empeg! I have like 90 megs free on an 18GB drive! Unbelievable. I guess my math was a little off.

Then I realized I accidentally encoded many of my albums as Stereo instead of Joint Stereo. I thought that might explain things... But I tried re-encoding in JS and there was no size difference at all... I expected at least a little, but nothing with any of the albums I tried. So I'm not going to bother re-encoding.

So anyway, it looks like I have to make some "cuts" from my collection. But I really do listen to every CD I own at one time or another... I thought about going through soundtracks and deleting some of the weaker songs from those... Or maybe I might have a disc or two that I only bought for a couple songs... But most of my albums I listen all the way through. Sigh... This is going to be a difficult process. I hope I'm not insane enough to buy a second HD for this thing...


-Tony
MkII 080000554